Hasta La Gadget!

Looks like the rumor of a new larger Kindle is true. Amazon just sent us an invitation to a press conference scheduled for Wednesday, May 6 at 10:30am ET. You know what Amazon does at press events? It launches new Kindles!

As noted by Peter Kafka over at All Things Digital, the location of the Amazon event — Pace University — is the historic, 19th century HQ to the New York Times which is said to be partnering with Amazon on the larger Kindle. That makes for a perfect symbolic bridge from old to new media. We’ll have to wait and see if newspaper subscribers can be lured across.

Update: We have a reliable tip that Barbara Snyder, president of Case Western Reserve University, and Arthur Sulzberger, top man at the New York Times will join Amazon’s Jeff Bezos on stage Wednesday. So it looks like a new Kindle focused on textbooks and newspapers is a lock.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Amazon press event Wednesday: See you and the bigger Kindle then originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 May 2009 06:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon is on the cusp of busting out a new, large format Kindle. The new e-ink device could be here this week and be big enough to read magazine and newspaper layouts without too much dickering with their designs.

This is the claim made in yesterday’s New York Times, citing “people briefed on the online retailer’s plans.”

Unfortunately, the story then goes off into a kind of newspaper fantasy land, full of unicorns, marshmallows and time-reversals. The big hope for the Big Kindle is that it will somehow reverse the fortunes of the the spluttering print news industry, allowing publishers to charge subscription fees and load their pages with advertising, even though everyone with an internet connection can get the same content free.

The move by newspapers and magazines to make their material freely available on the Web is now viewed by many as a critical blunder that encouraged readers to stop paying for the print versions.

And:

Publishers could possibly use these new mobile reading devices to hit the reset button and return in some form to their original business model: selling subscriptions, and supporting their articles with ads.

This is, apparently, serious. The trouble with this business “model” is that it forgets that there is an internet, while at the same time using that same internet as a convenient distribution system an order of magnitude cheaper than pulping trees, running them through a building-sized press and then moving them around the country in trucks. As others have written, news won’t go away if newspapers go away. The format of a print newspaper is dictated not by the content (the news) but by the technological limits of its production and distribution.

The NYT piece mentions, in passing, the real market for a large-format e-book: Text books. Not only would a big Kindle be easier to carry than a back-breaking rucksack full of college books, it would probably be cheaper. Cheaper, that is, if only the publishers would relent and stop overcharging for downloaded material.

For they, too, profit from scarcity, just like the newspapers, and scarcity no longer exists in a digital world. Charging $100 for a ones-and-zeros version of a $100 book is obviously nonsense, as the record labels found out when they lost their own industry to piracy. And the market here is college students, apparently the most voracious pirates of all. Catch them quick, textbook makers. Subsidize this new Kindle, make the books way cheaper than they are in print and allow students to re-sell them when they’re done, like they can now. Otherwise those students won’t be paying for your books at all.

Finally, while a large-screen Kindle would be very welcome, Amazon should perhaps start selling the regular Kindle outside the US. Just saying, is all.

Update: It looks like the story is true. Amazon has started sending out invites for a press event this Wednesday. Wired.com will be covering it, so stay tuned to Gadget Lab for the lowdown.

Update 3:30pm Pacific: According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, six universities will be offering their students e-textbooks on the large-screen Kindle.

Looking to Big-Screen E-Readers to Help Save the Daily Press [NYT]

Go ahead and grab the salt shaker, ’cause this one’s nowhere near carved in stone… or is it? A breaking report from The New York Times has it that Amazon will introduce a larger version of its Kindle e-reader “as early as this week,” one that’s tailored for “displaying newspapers, magazines and perhaps textbooks.” If you’ll recall, magazine publisher Hearst made its intentions public to produce such a device earlier this year, noting that a larger panel would be more conducive to traditional print media layouts, and thus, additional revenue from ads. The article also notes that Plastic Logic will “start making digital newspaper readers by the end of the year.”

Coincidentally (or not), the Wall Street Journal also published a report this evening that dug deeper into the aforementioned Hearst deal. As the story goes, a number of big-shots in the publishing industry are banding together to set their own subscription rates (rather than go through a middleman such as Amazon), and this writeup asserts that Plastic Logic’s reader won’t actually roll out until “early next year” (as we’d heard previously). If you’re seriously able to handle yet another twist in this madness, WSJ also points out that “people familiar with the matter” have stated that Apple is “readying a device that may make it easier to read digital books and periodicals,” but it’s hard to say if this is simply regurgitation of unfounded rumors already going around or something entirely more legitimate.

All in all, it’s clear that flagging print publications are desperate for a device that caters to its layout and allows them to regulate rates — only time will tell if there’s room for two, three or possibly more of these so-called “big-screen e-readers” in the world, but this week definitely just got a whole lot more interesting.

Update: Press event invite just received, it’s on for Wednesday!

Read – New York Times report
Read – Wall Street Journal report

Filed under: Displays, Handhelds

NYT: Big-screen Kindle coming from Amazon “as early as this week” originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 03 May 2009 23:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We knew you’d do the right thing Cowon, we just knew it. Barely a fortnight after the company introduced its most capacious S9 to date over in South Korea, said player has made its way stateside… at least that’s the impression that we get. Listed now as “in stock” on Amazon, the 32GB Titanium / Black unit is shown as being sold by JetAudio, which just so happens to be Cowon’s official online home for sales. If you surf over to the S9 section on JetAudio’s website, however, the 16GB model is still listed as the largest one available. We’re guessing the latter’s admin hasn’t had time to update things between that Friday night rave and that six pack of Dos Equis on Saturday, but we hear Amazon has a pretty good reputation, anyway.

[Via PMP Today]

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Cowon’s 32GB S9 PMP goes on sale in America originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 03 May 2009 04:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon yesterday announced a couple of changes to Whispernet for the Kindle. Users can now send DOCX (the proprietary Word 2007 form) and RTF files to be read on the device.

The company also introduced a new–and potentially more expensive–fee structure for docs sent over the network. Rather than simply charging a 10-cent-per-document fee, the company has begun charging by the megabyte.Documents will now run users 15 cents per megabyte, rounded up to the next megabyte.